visionCLICK® for ThreadX®

Introduction to ThreadX Kernel Awareness for
Wind River’s visionCLICK® Debugger

Advanced ThreadX RTOS awareness for visionCLICK is delivered and installed as a part of the Wind River VisionCLICK debugger. Kernel Awareness facilitates rapid understanding of what is happening in the ThreadX application, including information about all application threads and any other application ThreadX object. VisionCLICK is supported for use with the ColdFire architecture, with additional architectures coming soon.

visionClick Debugger Screen

Introduction to the Plugin

The plugin introduces the following elements in the VisionCLICK user interface:

In the View menu, it installs a number of entries corresponding to the various types of ThreadX-specific windows that can be opened by the plugin.
It installs a new menu, named ThreadX, with entries for various RTOS-specific commands, in particular thread-related stepping commands.
It installs a new toolbar with buttons for commands from the ThreadX menu.

Windows

visionCLICK kernel awareness for ThreadX introduces several useful debugger windows. You can right-click in most of the windows to display a context menu where you can change display format (hexadecimal/decimal).

These windows enable viewing of Threads, Queues, Timers, Event Flags, Semaphores, Mutexes, Block Pools, Byte Pools, and the ThreadX version number.

visionClick Debugger Window

Version Window

visionClick Debugger Version Window

The Thread List Window

This window shows a list of all threads created by the current application (by calls to tx_thread_create) and some items pertaining to their current state. The currently active thread is indicated by a state of RUNNING in the State column. The order of the threads is that of the _tx_thread_created_ptr.

The ThreadX->Thread Info display includes a Maximum stack pointer value that shows how much stack has been used thus far.

Inspector Windows

The other windows display ThreadX status information of various types. These windows are formatted but passive displays of various internal ThreadX data structures that have been created and are being used by the application.